The joy of books. El placer de los libros

I am a compulsive reader and, like Borges, I always wonder how many books I will be able to read before I die. So lately I am selecting the ones (from the so many I have) important for me to read first of all. Setting aside this issue, I enjoyed taking pictures of this installation by Pancho Luna, exhibited at Los Angeles Art Show 2017. What an interesting way to design a library!!

Siendo lectora compulsiva, suelo preguntarme como Borges, cuántos libros podré leer antes de morir. Así que últimamente estoy seleccionando aquéllos (de los tantos que tengo) que me resultan más importantes para leer primero. Dejando de lado el tema, me dio mucho placer sacar fotos de esta instalación de Pancho Luna, expuesta en Los Angeles Art Show 2017. Qué forma tan interesante de diseñar una biblioteca!

De la venta de libros piratas en Lima, Perú

Jiron Quilca, una de las calles de Lima donde se puede comprar libros piratas.

Foto del artículo de Manuel Vigo, link abajo

Quisiera compartir un post publicado por Manuel Vigo en Informal City Dialogues acerca de la venta de libros ¨pirata¨ en Lima, Perú.

El artículo es muy interesante, más allá de mostrarnos el pintoresquismo de los procederes ilegales, cómo se burla a los derechos de autor ante la gran cantidad de prensas que todo lo copian, -incluso antes que el Best Seller salga a la venta-, se plantea una realidad que es imposible evadir: los costos de los libros originales y la imposibilidad de comprarlos cuando cuestan más que el promedio del sueldo de un día de trabajo.

Lo que no justifica la piratería, pero al menos la hace comprensible, especialmente cuando de textos de universidades se trata, cómo se puede estudiar en facultades que tienen sólo un par de -copias- disponibles? Y sólo de algunos libros.

En la contracara de la situación, la nota nos recuerda que un autor que es pirateado, debiera ser feliz de serlo, ya que implica popularidad, un cierto homenaje a la creación.

También deja entrever la diferencia entre bajar libros on line y comprarlos ¨truchos,¨ pareciera que comparlos hace el acto más digno. Mi esposo, que está muy en contra de estas ilegalidades y prefiere publicar sus libros en forma gratuita on line, me aclara, con razón, que una cosa es la necesidad de bajar un libro por falta de dinero y otra la de los empresarios que se llenan los bolsillos con la venta en el mercado negro, porque, obviamente hay todo un negocio tras de ello, opinión que yo suavizo diciendo que además genera fuente de trabajo para tanta gente pobre.

Como ven, tengo una postura ambigua porque he conocido mucha gente buena de Perú, inmigrantes en Buenos Aires, y sé cómo piensan y cómo trabajan de sol a sol, intentando sobrevivir, los que viajan y sus familias que quedan en sus países. Y no estoy a favor de los ¨manteros,¨ nombre que se le da en mi país a aquéllos que tienden sus mantas incluso frente a los negocios donde se venden los mismos productos, originales, ya que el que alquila el local debe pagar todos los servicios, incluídos los impuestos. Mi corazón comprende fundamentalmente a los estudiantes......

Voy a dejar el link para el texto completo y copio solamente un párrafo, si Ud no lee inglés, use el traductor de Google porque vale la pena leerlo. En este blog, encontrará el traductor arriba, a la derecha.

The illegal copies aren’t restricted to high-profile places like Jiron Quilca – they’re ubiquitous, displayed by street vendors, on highway stands, inside markets and during the summer months at the city’s most popular beaches. According to one estimate, quoted by the BBC, Peru’s pirated-book publishers employ more people than their legal counterparts, and are thought to cost the industry $52 million in annual losses. In formal Peruvian bookstores the price of an average book hovers around 50 soles, or about $18, which is significantly more than what the average Peruvian makes in a day.

Many titles from Peruvian writers have also been given the full pirating treatment, including books by Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel Laureate, who has said the country’s book piracy “reflects the little or no respect for the law.”

Book pirates are known for their resourcefulness. Illegal copies of major novels are known to make their way to the streets on or before the official release date. 

http://nextcity.org/informalcity/entry/amid-an-epidemic-of-book-piracy-authors-shrug-and-say-at-least-theyre-readi

John Gerard's Herball (Vanishing old London.....)

The seventeenth-and eighteenth-century courts and alleys of London had mostly vanished before these drawings were made. The Kingsway and Charing Cross Road “improvement” schemes were conspicuous stages in a process of attrition which is perpetually at work. Shepherd's Market, behind Piccadilly, may serve as a surviving type of those quiet dim-lit areas which covered half Central London in Dickens's day; and there are corners in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn and Fetter Lane where their atmosphere is still to be recovered. From “A London Revery. Chapter Vanishing London.” A Project Gutenberg Canada, on line.

The best known and loved herbalist is John Gerard, born in Cheshire, England (1545-1612). His “Herball” or “General Historie of Plants” first published in 1597 contains other herbalist’s flowers to be considered the greatest book on the subject, but it has remained popular for over 400 years for its collection of medical “virtues” of plants. Gerard writes of many friends whose gifts to him were rare plants and seeds from all over the world.

The Herball. From http://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/heritage/plants/History/GerardHerball_tp.jpg

John Gerard. From http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/rare_books/herbalism/assets/gerard.jpg

He was apprenticed for a career of a surgeon in 1562, but his reputation, however, rests on horticulture. As early as 1577, Gerard superintended several gardens and plant collections of William Cecil (Lord Burghley, the first minister of Queen Elizabeth).

Gerard wrote as a modest man, leaving credits for researchers as “physitions of London Colledge”. From Herball’s preface, I quote these beautiful words "Although my paines have not been spent (Curteous Reader) in the gracious discoverie of golden mines, nor in the tracing after silver veines, whereby my native country might be enriched with such merchandise as it hath most in request and admiration; yet hath my labour (I trust) been otherwise profitably employed, in descrying of such a harmlesse treasure of herbes, trees, and plants, as the earth frankely without violence offereth unto our most necessarie uses."

Herbs from Gerard’s Herball. http://www.philographikon.com/images%20botregbivortgerard/gerardbuglosse.gif

Pinetree from Gerard’s Herball. http://www.philographikon.com/imagesbotanicals/gerardmtpinetree.gif

Gerard’s Herball is more than a mere compilation. Although he stresses medicinal qualities of plants, attention is drawn to ornamental and food values, and includes extensive comments on culture and history. According to J.W. Lever (1952) there is circumstantial evidence that Gerard’s Herball may have been a source for William Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

His own garden was situated in what is now Fetter Lane. It must have been a beautiful garden with thousand of herbs, many of them rarities at that time. In 1596 he published a 24 page catalogue of his plants, and it was the first complete catalogue of plants in a garden.

Fetter lane, view from Holborn. http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/DisappearingLondon/FetterLaneHolborn.jpg

Two hundred years later, Henry Phillips described the change that had come to the neighborhood since Gerard had cultivated his garden there.

“ What would be the astonishment of this excellent old herbalist, could he be recalled, to see each avenue of his garden formed into streets; houses erected on his parsley beds, and chimneys sprung up as thick as his asparagus; churches occupying the site of his arbours, and his tool-house, perhaps, converted into the British Museum, where is safely housed the lasting memorial of his labours. In vain would he now seek wild plants in Mary-le-bone, where each blade of grass is transformed into granite, and every hawthorn hedge changed for piles of bricks: carriages rattling where sanils were formerly crawling. His ear would be assailed by the shrill cry of “Milk below”, and the deep tone of “ Old clothes”, where he had formerly retired to listen to the melody of the early lark, or the plaintive tones of the nightingale”.

REFERENCES

This post was composed with:
Jules Janick. 1987 Proc. Second National Herb Growing and Marketing Conference, Purdue Research foundation. http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/history/lecture23/r_23-2.html
Lesley Gordon. Green Magic. Chapter X. Some Herbals and Herbalists, page 66. New York.

Burnt books in Kathmandu

Sharing from Nationatl Geographic.com. Photograph by Navesh Chitrakar, Reuters

This aerial photo shows police in Nepal looking through burnt books following a massive fire at a tourist hub in Kathmandu, Nepal (map). Local media reported that flames first sparked in the kitchen of a lounge and bar when a cooking gas cylinder exploded. Flames spread quickly to two other buildings, including a large bookstore.

No deaths were reported, but hundreds of books did suffer from the incident.

Why We Love It

"The overhead shot gives you a sense of how overwhelming the clean-up process will be for the police. The picture is intriguing because its subject matter is not immediately clear; we need to squint at it for a few moments to understand what is going on in the frame."—Alia Wilhelm, photo intern

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/pictures/130702-photography-best-month-science-culture-nation-world/?utm_source=NatGeocom&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=pom_20130620&utm_campaign=Content#/best-news-pictures-june-2013-burned-books_69029_600x450.jpg

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with 42 illustrations by Gustave Doré

The first time I´ve read -part of- this poem written by Coleridge, was in the introduction of the book Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. There, I´ve learnt that she was inspired by Coleridge´s descriptions for the beginning and the end of her novel.

Remember the creature (it had never had a name) stays somewhere in the Artic Pole, and it is not clear if he will die or not. 

Last year, I had to download The Rime of the Ancient Mariner for my son, for his literature class, among other classics, and thought it was time for me to read it completely. So, I´ve downloaded it to my tablet too, but before I could start reading it, I came across with this wonderful edition, with 42 illustrations by Gustave Doré, at the Public Library of Huntington Beach. I feel really fortunate for my new treasure acquisition.

From wikipedia:

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere) is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98 and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Modern editions use a later revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it was a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rime_of_the_Ancient_Mariner

From The Grand Medieval Bestiary

Reference: http://www.abbeville.com/bookpage.asp?ISBN=9780789211279

The ¨standing man¨ of Turkey and the silent readers

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Leaf Storm centres on a family in limbo following the death of a man passionately hated, yet tied to the family. Photo by George Henton

Erdem Gunduz stands in Taksim Square during a 'duranadam', or standing man protest, in Istanbul. Photograph: Vassil Donev/EPA http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/18/turkish-man-silent-vigil-taksim-square

Istanbul, Turkey - After weeks of violent clashes between police and protesters across Turkey a new form of resistance has emerged - the "Standing Man".

Standing silently, and initially alone, Turkish performance artist Erdem Gunduz stood, with his hands in his pockets, facing the Ataturk Cultural Centre in Taksim Square, Istanbul, for eight hours.

With extraordinary speed, Gunduz become the latest symbol of the resistance movement. In days that followed, thousands of people would emulate his solitary act, standing silently, for minutes or hours, in places across Turkey.

Keep on reading:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2013/06/2013624105477515.html

Tango with Cows (Tango s Korovami)

Image: Getty Research Institute

David Burlyuk (American, born Ukraine, 1882-1967) and Vladimir Burlyuk (Ukrainian, 1887-1917) written by Vasily Kamensky (Russian, 1884-1961)

 Tango with Cows (Tango s Korovami), 1914 Book with three lithographs in black and letterpress in black on yellow wallpaper 198 x 202 x 5 mm Mary and Leigh Block Endowment Fund, 2009.238 Prints and Drawings

 These recently acquired books by progressive Russian artists and poets, made between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, aimed to overthrow conventions of art and society simultaneously. Their makers believed that art and language needed to become immediate and real—part of everyday life—and as a result these Futurist books were willfully made with cheap materials, and appeared purposely unrefined, as if they were products of wild and primitive behavior.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/199067

The title of Vasilii Kamenskii's artist's book, "Tango s korovami" (Tango with Cows), evoked the clash between Russian rural culture and growing urban life. The book was printed on sheets of wallpaper. Page spread from "Tango s korovami : zhelezobetonnyi a poemy," Vasilii Kamenskii, 1914.

Source: Getty Research Institute

These images from
http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=11018

Tango With Cows (poem) 

Life is shorter than the squeal of a sparrow.
Like a dog, regardless, sailing 
on an ice floe down the river in spring? 
With tinned mirth we look at our destiny. 
We - the discoverers of countries - 
conquerors of the air - 
kings of orange groves
and cattle. 
Perhaps we will drink 
a glass of wine 
to the health of the comets, 
expiring diamond blood. 
Or better still – 
we’ll get a record player. 
Well, to hell with you! - 
hornless and ironed! 
I want one - 
to dance one 
tango with cows
 and to build bridges - 
from the tears 
of bovine jealousy
to the tears 
of crimson girls

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_With_Cows

Sharing the illuminated Book of Hours or Black Hours

I´ve followed the link via Projectgutenberg.org and couldn´t wait to share this marvelous book.

From the Morgan Library web page:

This Book of Hours, referred to as the Black Hours, is one of a small handful of manuscripts written and illuminated on vellum that is stained or painted black. The result is quite arresting. The text is written in silver and gold, with gilt initials and line endings composed of chartreuse panels enlivened with yellow filigree. Gold foliage on a monochromatic blue background makes up the borders. The miniatures are executed in a restricted palette of blue, old rose, and light flesh tones, with dashes of green, gray, and white. The solid black background is utilized to great advantage, especially by means of gold highlighting.

The anonymous painter of the Black Hours is an artist whose style depended mainly upon that of Willem Vrelant, one of the dominant illuminators working in Bruges from the late 1450s until his death in 1481. As in the work of Vrelant, figures in angular drapery move somewhat stiffly in shallowly defined spaces. The men's flat faces are dominated by large noses.

Although, in general, well preserved, this manuscript has some condition problems. The black of its vellum—the very thing that makes the codex so striking—is also the cause of some serious flaking. The carbon used in the black renders the surface of the vellum smooth and shiny—a handsome but less than ideal supporting surface for some of the pigments. The Morgan's Black Hours is awaiting conservation treatment. In the meantime, we are pleased to offer a virtual facsimile.

"Black Hours," for Rome use. Belgium, Bruges, c. 1470 (MS M.493).

http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/BlackHours/

From the book Wall Art by Stefan and Betty Merken

This is a gift from my daughter, while I was writing an article for an architectural Journal in Chile, that contained some thoughts about murals in Los Angeles.

Here, my selection of pictures from the book, some murals in Los Angeles, most of them are not on the walls any more.

The great story of the Timbuktu´s manuscripts salvation

Haidara with his manuscripts in 2009.Brent Stirton/Getty Images

I´m sharing an excerpt of the great article by Yochi Dreazen that tells us the story of the old Timbuktu´s manuscripts salvation from Al Qaeda´s linked Islamist group, Ansar Dine, which for most part of last year ruled Timbuktu through terror.

¨When Abdel Kader Haidara was 17 years old, he took a vow. Among the families of Timbuktu with manuscript collections (and the Haidaras had one of the largest), it’s traditional for one family member from each generation to swear publicly that he will protect the library for as long as he lives. The families revere their manuscripts, even honoring them once a year through a holiday called Maouloud, on which imams and family elders perform a reading from the ancient prayer books to mark the birth of the Prophet Mohammed. 

W h

 “Those manuscripts were my father’s life,” Haidara told me. “They became my life as well.” That life came under serious threat last year, when a military coup ousted Mali’s democratically elected leader just as a loose alliance of Tuareg separatists and three Islamist militias began conquering broad swaths of the north. The rebels quickly routed the Malian army, and Timbuktu fell in April 2012. As the militias poured into his city, Haidara knew he had to do something to protect the approximately 300,000 manuscripts in different libraries and homes in and around Timbuktu.

Haidara had spent years traveling around the country negotiating with Mali’s ancient families to assemble thousands of texts for the Ahmed Baba Institute, which was founded in 1973 as the city’s first official preservation organization. “When I thought of something happening to the manuscripts, I couldn’t sleep,” he told me later. 

 The initial wave of invaders were secular Tuareg, but quickly the Islamist militia Ansar Dine asserted control, imposing a harsh regime of sharia in Timbuktu and other northern cities. The Islamists didn’t know, at first, about the manuscripts. But their indiscriminate cruelty and their tight-fisted control over the city meant that the texts had to be hidden—and fast. Haidara thought the manuscripts would be most secure in the homes of Timbuktu’s old families, where, after all, they had been protected for centuries. He assembled a small army of custodians, archivists, tour guides, secretaries, and other library employees, as well as his own brothers and cousins and other men from the manuscript-holding families, and began organizing an evacuation plan.

Starting in early May, every morning before sunrise, while the militants were still asleep, Haidara and his men would walk to the city’s libraries and lock themselves inside. Until the heat cleared the streets in the afternoon, the men would find their way through the darkened buildings and wrap the fragile manuscripts in soft cloths. They would then pack them into metal lockers roughly the size of large suitcases, as many as 300 in each. 

At night, they’d sneak back to the libraries, traveling by foot to avoid checkpoints on the road, pick up the lockers, and carry them, swathed in blankets, to the homes of dozens of the city’s old families. The entire operation took nearly two months, but by July, they had stowed 1,700 lockers in basements and hideaways around the city. And they did it just in time, because not long after, the militants moved into the Ahmed Baba Institute, using its elegant rooms to store canned vegetables and bags of white rice. Haidara fled to Bamako, hoping the Islamists’ ignorance about the texts would keep them safe.¨

Read the article in full:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112898#

Spanish words in the ¨pure¨ English

These sculpted words are designed by Stephan Sagmeister. Google images

Here´s an excerpt from the great article by Korey Stamper at The Guardian, who reflects about the Spanish words that are contained in the English language. The text is mocking the tendency of the immigration debate to keep ¨only¨ English. Besides, this is enlightening, by force of habit, I haven´t noticed our words intermingled in the everyday language.

¨Take Spanish, a frequent target of American lexical jingoism: English has been borrowing words from Spanish – or its ancestor language, Old Spanish – since the 14th century. It's not surprising when you consider that Spain was one of the reigning world powers in the Middle Ages. During the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish managed to circumnavigate the globe, conquer half of the New World, and claim thePacific Ocean. They gave the world Henry VIII's first (and most long-lived) wife, Catherine of Aragon. And they coughed up two Popes and an Antipope.

Our oldest Spanish "loanwords" give you a sense of just how much of the world Spain was conquering. "Armadillo", "iguana", "sarsaparilla", and "tobacco" describe new flora and fauna Spanish explorers found in North and South America. "Canary" flitted into English from the Spanish name for a group of islands off the coast of Africa. "Eskimo", while ultimately from an Algonquian language of western Canada, likely was introduced into English via Spanish.

Spanish influence doesn't end with the Renaissance: almost a quarter of the US was under Mexican or Spanish rule until the mid 1800s. If you grew up watching spaghetti Westerns or idolizing the Wild West as presented by Johns Wayne and Ford, then you are steeped in Spanish loanwords. Renegade caballeros on broncos, riding through the canyons of Colorado – if you dump the Spanish loanwords, you're left with "on, riding through the of".

Over the last 400 years, there have been movements to make English a "pure" language, and these movements have generally targeted foreign loanwords. Even lexicographers were not immune from lexical nationalism: Samuel Johnson, in writing his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, omitted foreign words (like "skunk" and "hickory") that had gained currency in the English-speaking American colonies.

But such movements ignore a basic fact: English has been borrowing words from other languages since its infancy. The names for the days of the week are some of our oldest English words, and they honor the sun, the moon, and a handful of northern Germanic gods the Anglo-Saxons worshipped. But "Saturday", the beginning of our weekend, honors a Roman god in Saxon clothes: the Anglo-Saxon "sætern" means "Saturn" and was stolen outright from Latin.

And so it goes, throughout history. English takes Latin words and Old Norse words, then dips into French, Spanish, Arabic, Dutch, Bantu, Wolof – and that doesn't even bring us into the modern era of immigration, where loanwords from Yiddish, Modern Greek, Italian, German, Japanese, Farsi, Irish Gaelic, and other languages arrive.¨

Korean garments from disassembled old books

Traditional Korean garments are reinvented in this robe made from disassembled old books. Artist Kim Tae Soon sees her work as a commentary on the Confucian tradition of burning the clothing of deceased parents to speed their journey to heaven. “A Korean Rauschenberg” is how Getty president Jim Cuno describes it. More of Kim Tae Soon’s costume series here: http://www.kimtaesoon.com/spirit-hanbok.html

Via https://www.facebook.com/TheGetty

That men are not to judge of our happiness till after death

Montaigne. Dali´s illustration for Essays of Michel de Montaigne

 [Charron has borrowed with unusual liberality from this and the
     succeeding chapter.  See Nodier, Questions, p. 206.]

                         "Scilicet ultima semper
               Exspectanda dies homini est; dicique beatus
               Ante obitum nemo supremaque funera debet."

     ["We should all look forward to our last day: no one can be called
     happy till he is dead and buried."—Ovid, Met, iii. 135]

The very children know the story of King Croesus to this purpose, who being taken prisoner by Cyrus, and by him condemned to die, as he was going to execution cried out, "O Solon, Solon!" which being presently reported to Cyrus, and he sending to inquire of him what it meant, Croesus gave him to understand that he now found the teaching Solon had formerly given him true to his cost; which was, "That men, however fortune may smile upon them, could never be said to be happy till they had been seen to pass over the last day of their lives," by reason of the uncertainty and mutability of human things, which, upon very light and trivial occasions, are subject to be totally changed into a quite contrary condition. And so it was that Agesilaus made answer to one who was saying what a happy young man the King of Persia was, to come so young to so mighty a kingdom: "'Tis true," said he, "but neither was Priam unhappy at his years."—[Plutarch, Apothegms of the Lacedaemonians.]—In a short time, kings of Macedon, successors to that mighty Alexander, became joiners and scriveners at Rome; a tyrant of Sicily, a pedant at Corinth; a conqueror of one-half of the world and general of so many armies, a miserable suppliant to the rascally officers of a king of Egypt: so much did the prolongation of five or six months of life cost the great Pompey; and, in our fathers' days, Ludovico Sforza, the tenth Duke of Milan, whom all Italy had so long truckled under, was seen to die a wretched prisoner at Loches, but not till he had lived ten years in captivity,—[He was imprisoned by Louis XI. in an iron cage]— which was the worst part of his fortune. The fairest of all queens, —[Mary, Queen of Scots.]—widow to the greatest king in Europe, did she not come to die by the hand of an executioner? Unworthy and barbarous cruelty! And a thousand more examples there are of the same kind; for it seems that as storms and tempests have a malice against the proud and overtowering heights of our lofty buildings, there are also spirits above that are envious of the greatnesses here below:

              "Usque adeo res humanas vis abdita quaedam
               Obterit, et pulchros fasces, saevasque secures
               Proculcare, ac ludibrio sibi habere videtur."

     ["So true it is that some occult power upsets human affairs, the
     glittering fasces and the cruel axes spurns under foot, and seems to
     make sport of them."—Lucretius, v.  1231.]

And it should seem, also, that Fortune sometimes lies in wait to surprise the last hour of our lives, to show the power she has, in a moment, to overthrow what she was so many years in building, making us cry out with Laberius:

                         "Nimirum hac die
          Una plus vixi mihi, quam vivendum fuit."

     ["I have lived longer by this one day than I should have
     done."—Macrobius, ii.  7.]

And, in this sense, this good advice of Solon may reasonably be taken; but he, being a philosopher (with which sort of men the favours and disgraces of Fortune stand for nothing, either to the making a man happy or unhappy, and with whom grandeurs and powers are accidents of a quality almost indifferent) I am apt to think that he had some further aim, and that his meaning was, that the very felicity of life itself, which depends upon the tranquillity and contentment of a well-descended spirit, and the resolution and assurance of a well-ordered soul, ought never to be attributed to any man till he has first been seen to play the last, and, doubtless, the hardest act of his part. There may be disguise and dissimulation in all the rest: where these fine philosophical discourses are only put on, and where accident, not touching us to the quick, gives us leisure to maintain the same gravity of aspect; but, in this last scene of death, there is no more counterfeiting: we must speak out plain, and discover what there is of good and clean in the bottom of the pot,

              "Nam vera; voces turn demum pectore ab imo
               Ejiciuntur; et eripitur persona, manet res."

     ["Then at last truth issues from the heart; the visor's gone,
     the man remains."—Lucretius, iii.  57.]

Wherefore, at this last, all the other actions of our life ought to be tried and sifted: 'tis the master-day, 'tis the day that is judge of all the rest, "'tis the day," says one of the ancients,—[Seneca, Ep., 102]— "that must be judge of all my foregoing years." To death do I refer the assay of the fruit of all my studies: we shall then see whether my discourses came only from my mouth or from my heart. I have seen many by their death give a good or an ill repute to their whole life. Scipio, the father-in-law of Pompey, in dying, well removed the ill opinion that till then every one had conceived of him. Epaminondas being asked which of the three he had in greatest esteem, Chabrias, Iphicrates, or himself. "You must first see us die," said he, "before that question can be resolved."—[Plutarch, Apoth.]—And, in truth, he would infinitely wrong that man who would weigh him without the honour and grandeur of his end.

God has ordered all things as it has best pleased Him; but I have, in my time, seen three of the most execrable persons that ever I knew in all manner of abominable living, and the most infamous to boot, who all died a very regular death, and in all circumstances composed, even to perfection. There are brave and fortunate deaths: I have seen death cut the thread of the progress of a prodigious advancement, and in the height and flower of its increase, of a certain person,—[Montaigne doubtless refers to his friend Etienne de la Boetie, at whose death in 1563 he was present.]—with so glorious an end that, in my opinion, his ambitious and generous designs had nothing in them so high and great as their interruption. He arrived, without completing his course, at the place to which his ambition aimed, with greater glory than he could either have hoped or desired, anticipating by his fall the name and power to which he aspired in perfecting his career. In the judgment I make of another man's life, I always observe how he carried himself at his death; and the principal concern I have for my own is that I may die well—that is, patiently and tranquilly.

ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm

Illustrations by Dali, for Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Enjoy more of Dali´s:

http://dalibookcollector.blogspot.com/p/books-illustrated-by-dali.html